And so the opposition’s crusade against online poker gets dirtier.
It has been revealed that an op-ed piece published by the Press of Atlantic City in March has been wrongly attributed to Poker Hall of Famer Dewey Tomko. And this attribution was not an accident.
The piece, published on March 19, and allegedly written by Tomko and “poker player” Bill Byers, reads like a page out of the Sheldon Adelson manual for scaring the uneducated public. More specifically, it sounded like the voice of Adelson’s spiritual tag-along, Jim Thackston, albeit given a slightly more pro-poker filter to not make it sound so fanatical.
Probably because it was.
While the editorial did say “we fully support the legalization of Internet poker,” it contained much of the anti-online poker rhetoric that is repeatedly spouted by Thackston. It referenced the FBI letter to Congress that supporters of Adelson’s Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling love to point to, saying that online gambling can be “used for criminal or terrorist financing.”
“Apparently,” the article went on, “criminals can use technology that poker websites cannot detect to hide both the identity and location of a poker player, enabling the corruption of virtual poker tables. Background information related to the FBI concerns suggests that the technology enables multi-player collusion.”
It continues to discuss how players could collude, how difficult it can be to detect when several players are involved, and how supposedly existing technology could make life even harder for those trying to track down the cheaters.
And the article uses the typical Thackston strategy of asking the pro-poker side to prove a negative, without actually providing evidence for the opposite side:
It is disturbing that the industry, regulators and organizations purporting to protect the interests of players have not addressed the issue, despite their claims that the game is safe. Rather than being comforted by the industry touting that there have been zero problems in Europe, New Jersey, Delaware and Nevada, we find that analysis less than credible. A more realistic view is that collusion and cheating are indeed occurring but going undetected.
At the time of the article’s publication, it did seem strange that it Dewey Tomko, a long time live poker pro, would write something like that, as he has never been known to be involved in online poker, beyond his association about a decade ago with Doyle’s Room, which was done as a favor for his friend, Doyle Brunson.
It now appears that it seemed strange because it wasn’t true. Nolan Dalla, World Series of Poker media maven and one of the most trusted men in poker, just so happens to be friends with Dewey Tomko. He called his friend over the weekend to ask him about the article, to which Tomko replied, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You know me. I don’t write columns to newspapers. I’ve got other things that keep me plenty busy.”
Hmm. Ok. Well, you must have talked to Bill Byers about it, at least.
“Sure, I know Bill Byers. But I haven’t talked to him in ten years.”
So, you never gave permission to have your name tacked onto the editorial?
“No. That didn’t happen. No one ever asked me about it. This is the first I’ve ever heard about it.”
Don’t you at least hate online poker or something?
“I’m totally in favor of online poker. I haven’t played it. But I know it’s good for poker. I can’t really comment at all about security because I’m not qualified in that area. How could I be? How can they say that about me? I would never write such a thing about online poker. I would never do anything to hurt the game. You know that.”
Ok then. Unless he is flat-out lying to his friend, Dewey Tomko had absolutely nothing to do with the editorial that ran in the Press of Atlantic City, nor was he even aware of its existence.
Who, then, wrote the piece? While we of course cannot say with 100 percent certainty, we are pretty confident that it was Thackston and Byers. I mean, look at this article published on TheHill.com a month ago, written by Thackston (and this is just one example of Thackston’s rants). He references the “Tomko” editorial, but everything else is basically a more pro-prohibitionist version of it. The reasons the authors of the Press of Atlantic City article said they were for the legalization of online poker were almost certainly to a) make it not seem as obvious from whom the opinion was coming, and b) to make it more conceivable that Tomko could have written it.
